Jenkins Bakery celebrates National Doughnut Week
For seven days every year, bakers up and down the country sell doughnuts to raise money for The Children's Trust, a national charity which provides specialist care and rehabilitation for children with multiple disabilities.
The Llanelli-based bakery is one of a handful of bakery businesses in Wales participating in the scheme.
“We are a family business and always keen to put something back into the community,” said Russell Jenkins, operations director of the Jenkins Bakery.
“We have taken part in National Doughnut Week for a number of years and we will be doing our best to make sure that staff and customers can have a bit of fun raising cash for a very worthwhile charity.”
Over the last 20 years, National Doughnut Week has raised more than £735,000. In 2013, the target is to raise at least £30,000.
National Doughnut Week is sponsored by leading bakery ingredients and products supplier CSM United Kingdom.
National Doughnut Week sees participating bakers across the UK raise money for The Children's Trust by donating money for every doughnut they sell.
Members of the public can join in by holding doughnut sales at work and buying doughnuts from their local participating outlet.
Mr Jenkins added: “Our doughnuts are already very popular with the public and we hope they will be an even bigger hit this week as we all pull together to help The Children’s Trust.
“For every doughnut sold, we will donate 5p to the National Children’s Trust.
“Varieties include the following - Single Doughnut, Sugar Ring Doughnut, Fruit and Custard Doughnut, Chocolate Ring Doughnut and Fresh Cream Doughnut.
“Last year, we raised £500 for the Children’s Trust charity and we are hoping to beat that figure this year.
“During the week, we are hoping to sell 15,000 doughnuts.
“This year, we will have new varieties of doughnuts on sale - Coconut Ring, Lemon Ring and Strawberry Ring."
The Jenkins Bakery employs 280 people, full and part-time, across 26 different stores in South Wales, with a main bakery and HQ in Llanelli. The company has shops in an area stretching from Carmarthen to Bridgend. The bakery is celebrating 90 years in business this year.
Here are a few fascinating facts about doughnuts . . .
1. The doughnut as we know it today, supposedly came to Manhattan under the Dutch name of olykoeks, meaning oily cakes.
2. Around 1847 a New England ship captain's mother, Elizabeth Gregory, made some deep-fried cakes for her son Hanson and his crew for their long sea voyages. They were eaten with the view that they would help to ward off scurvy and colds!
3. Later Hanson was regarded as the chap who introduced the hole to the centre! He remains something of a creator and today there stands a plaque in honour of Captain Hanson Gregory in Clam Cove, Maine, as the man who invented the hole in the doughnut!
4. In the middle of World War One, millions of homesick American "doughboys" were served up countless doughnuts by women volunteers, trying to give the soldiers a taste of home.
5. During World War Two, Red Cross women otherwise known as Doughnut Dollies passed out hot doughnuts to the solders.
6. The first doughnut machine was invented in New York during 1920 by a man named Adolph Levitt, a refugee from Czarist Russia. Levitt's doughnut machine was a huge hit causing doughnuts to spread like wildfire.
7. Doughnuts increased in popularity during the early 1900s, and by 1934 at the World's Fair in Chicago, doughnuts were described as "the hit food of the century of Progress". It was the fact that they used machinery to create them which engaged so many people over the country.
8. If all the doughnuts sold during 20 years of National Doughnut Week were stacked on top of each other, they would reach into space.
9. To 'dunk your doughnut' was allegedly introduced as a trend after actress Mae Murray accidently dropped one in her coffee.
10. On one of his South Pole expeditions, Admiral Richard Byrd took 100 barrels of doughnut flour. This was enough to last them two years.
11. The largest doughnut ever made was an American-style jelly doughnut. It weighed 1.7 tons, was 16ft wide and 16inches high. It was made in Utica, New York, USA on January 21, 1993.
12. The record for doughnut eating is held by John Haight, who ate 29 doughnuts in just over six minutes in 1981.
13. Two fundraisers from The Children's Trust attempted to break the world record for doughnut eating at The Sun online in 2007!
14. Today, in the United States alone, more than 10 billion doughnuts are made every year.
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Pictures above: Emma Lemon with some of the Jenkins Bakery doughnuts; Emma with Llanelli town centre colleagues Lucy Roderick, Ingrid Howells and Catherine Allen.
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